How Healthy Is It To Hold A Couple Grudge?

Serena Williams' husband Alexis Ohanian has delighted the internet by wearing a T-shirt with a coded message for Maria Sharapova during a tennis match that she was playing in

The T-shirt (which he tastefully only revealed after Sharapova had finished losing to his wife) read D.A.R.E. Fans think that this was a subtle dig at Sharapova who got a two-year suspension from the game for violating anti-doping rules (she claims she was taking meldonium for medical reasons).

In doing so, Alexis perfectly demonstrated the power of the couple grudge.

The couple grudge is when you dislike someone who you haven't personally got anything against, on the basis that your partner doesn't like them.

Let's face it, we've all been in a situation where we delight in our partner taking our side against someone else. It feels good to have someone blindly loyal to you.

As a teenager I was always jealous of people whose parents took their side when they complained that a teacher was bullying them or a friend was being mean. I'd hear other mums and dads agreeing that the teacher was a cow or the friend was a bitch and wish mine would do that, rather than asking me what I'd done to annoy the teacher or hurt the friend.

In retrospect they were almost always right, but at the time it felt achingly unfair. So, when it came to dating, I developed a bit of a fetish for the kind of man who would always take my side. I ended up dating people who said things like 'no one crosses my family' and 'if they hurt you they hurt me'. Which, unfortunately, tended to actually be a cover for some anger issues.

So, is the couple grudge healthy, or problematic? We spoke to dating and relationship expert James Preece{ =nofollow}, who told Grazia: 'Relationships are teams - so you stick up for each other and support them. If one person upsets your partner, you'll naturally dislike them too. That's partly because you'll only hear one side of the problem. It's perfectly normal and can bring you closer together.'

However, dating expert & author Noor Hibbertcautions that sharing a couple grudge can also be dangerous, saying: 'Holding onto any grudges is a sure-fire way to end up depleted of energy. Holding onto grudges is an unhealthy habit, so if as a couple you share a mutual grudge, you can work on processing and learning from it together, before moving on.

'Forgiveness is the quickest way to get over a grudge and when you are in it together, you can support each other in really moving forward.

'There’s a risk that you can spend too much energy discussing the grudge and even rile each other up to take it further than you would have done normally.'

So, as is so often the case, a middle ground is probably the right answer.

Having someone like Alexis who gently and quietly supports you is wonderful.

Having a partner who takes on every single one of your grudges as their own and then blows it up, making it bigger and more dramatic, is not wonderful, and could make the relationship extremely insular.

It's natural to want to feel that your other half is on your team, and there's nothing wrong with expecting your life partner not to be disloyal to you by showing kindness to someone you dislike.

That said, none of us are perfect and sometimes when these grudges arise they're not logical, or they're not worth wasting any time on. Just as it's wonderful to hear the person you love saying 'I'm on your side', sometimes it's important to hear them say, 'You're being unreasonable.'

Serena and Alexis remain the definition of couple goals, but if you let your couple grudges accumulate then you might end up with a long list of enemies to waste your time on.

In order to stay on the Serena and Alexis side of the couple grudge, not the Jamie and Cersei Lannister side (we all remember how it worked out for them), it's probably worth keeping your couple grudges to the absolute bare minimum, and telling each other when you're being unreasonable.